Enterprise Level SEO

Gah! Running to sessions! And to power outlets! So much running. But we’re here now and it’s time to talk about enterprise level SEO. Speaking we have Eddie Choi, Crispin Sheridan, Avi Wilensky and Andy Milburn. I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing a lot more accents.

First up is Crispin. He smiled at me and my knees went weak. It’s that kind of a day. Luckily I was sitting down. ;)

Crispin starts off by saying that he works for SAP…which is not that button on your TV. That’s something else. Hee! He’s had to get to know that very well.

Social Media: Making sure you get rankings and take advantage of social opportunities. They found that social originated traffic converts to a lead 2.5x average rate.

Avoid skill atrophy – Attend SES, keep yourself fresh

Takeaways

Determine what your specific challenges are

Identify the greatest areas of opportunity

Test, measure and promote your successes

Next up is Avi.

9 Enterprise SEO Problems…and how to solve them with crowdsourcing

1. Heaps of content: Lacking meta data (alt tags, title tags, etc). They walk into a client and there are tons of assets but none have the meta data attached. They need to get some semantic keywords in there so the search engines can understand what the content is about. They use Mechanical Turk. They feed the content into the platform. They build crowds of workers who are specialized and focused on the projects you’re going to give them. They built a crowd of Michael Jackson experts. They made them answer some multiple choice questions to pre-qualify them. Find the experts, streamline the tasks. Leverage plurality and adjudication for high quality output.

2. Duplicate Content: Often caused by globalization of sites. Humans are good at flagging duplicate content. Again, leverage plurality and adjudication.

4. Getting everyone on the same page: Designers, developments, content producers, project managers — you have to get them all on the same page. Build your own internal Wiki and make it the official destination where everyone can contribute and access quality information.

5. Many CMS types requiring specialists: 50+ CMS’ types at one of his clients. They all need specialists. Go on Odesk, Freelancer.com, Elance.

6. Scalable Sources of Linkbait: There are lots of different crowdsourced platforms. The biggest one is Mechanical Turk.

7. Global & Translation: Most of the Web is not made up of English speakers. Translation and crowdsourcing is a match made in heaven. Mechanical Turk has workers in 190 countries. Prequalify workers for knowledge of both languages. Prebuilt/prequalified translation crowds. Castingwords.com will do it for .75 to 2 dollars a word.

8. Large-scale keyword research: Humans are great keyword research tools! Tap into the wisdom of crowds. What keywords do my competitors have on their sites? Find the names of all reverse osmosis machines, models, SKUs,etc. Segmentation and categorization – filter for ambiguity. Video/audio translation services – speakertext = $2 per minute.

Why SEO is important to us – AMEX wants to be at the point of conversation. It’s about getting your voice heard. It’s not about just being found on Google or Bing, it’s about getting your voice out there. They want to be driving the conversation when their customers are there looking to buy a credit card or when they’re looking for travel recommendations.

What are they doing to drive maturity?

Step 1: Awareness – educate and raise awareness

Step 2: Growth – demonstrate sustained success

Step 3: Maturity – drive significant improvement

Step 4: Institutionalized – align strategic and digital marketing

What is it about?

Good Governance: They’ve found that SEO has dropped as an afterthought. They want to make sure SEO is being baked right into what they’re doing and that standards are in place.

Robust Arbitration: Without central process around keyword arbitration, they’re only going to get themselves in a bit of a mess. They don’t want to be bidding on terms like “credit cards”. It’s centrally managed, with regular reviews, easily accessible, senior sponsorship and with good SEO/SEM alignment.

External Insight:It’s easy for people to get bogged down in their daily business. They like to make sure people have that external insight, that they’re sharing best practices, that they’re aware of developments, etc. The key to this is the benchmarking in the industry and making sure they’re aware of what other people are doing to see where they stack up.

Engaged Partners: The challenge here is SEO has, in the past, been a bit of an afterthought. If they’re not engaging their partners right from the start, something is launched and then there’s a mad dash at the end because you forgot about SEO. He doesn’t want that to happen. They want to have technology at the table having a voice while putting together campaigns.

Google analytics and reporting: Everyone has separate goals, a different way of measuring things, etc. They make sure they have analytics at all levels of the organization. They look at KPIs that address the business unit needs, specific campaigns, etc. They want to have a single source of data for all of this.

Enterprise search team: The passion people bring is what really drives the SEO from an enterprise perspective. They’re providing support, best practices, visions and they’re sharing in the arbitration process.

The lessons we learned:

Fix SEO from the beginning: Harder to fix after launch.

Education everyone: SEO impacted by everything

Measure success: KPIs at all levels.

Central governance: Track compliance to standards centrally

Build a community: Passionate people make a difference

It’s a journey: Make someone responsible for driving it.

Next up is Eddie Choi.

2010 China’s Top Five Internet Usage

Search Engine

Online Music

Online News

Instant Messaging

Online Games

He shows a graph that’s in Chinese and tells us not to worry that we can’t read it and just to look at the growing blue line. Heh.

Challenge: Should I use Google or Baidu? That’s the number one question from clients.

Market share

Baidu – 75 percent

Google – 19.6 percent

That was last year. Baidu is up to 85 percent now. To do SEO for Baidu it can be good and bad at the same time. They have fantastic options for paid ads, it’s order when you’re doing it organically.

Baidu Suggests:

Do not use Flash or JavaScript for content

If you must use Flash, please also develop a non-Flash version and link it together

do not use AJAX for navigation

Do not use iframes

Baiduspider’s server is located inside China, behind the firewall. If your Web site is hosted outside China, the speed and the content they can crawl is significantly less than Google.

Types of Searches

In China, Taobao.com is the primary shopping engine. They have 370m users and account for 80 percent of the China e-commerce Web sites. When you are optimizing a shopping site, Taobao has better tools for you.

Information is pretty much available, but who should be responsible for doing this?

Keyword research (bilingual)

Tweak the meta information

input the information

Alter the Web design

Develop the links

And we are out of here. One more session to go. Stay with us.

About the Author

Lisa Barone co-founded Outspoken Media in 2009 and served as Chief Branding Officer until April 2012.

Contact

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